Saul P. Steinberg, Icon of the Corporate Takeover, Dies at 73

Saul Steinberg, a swashbuckling corporate raider who for more than three decades so terrified companies with attacks on their stock that some paid him millions just to go away, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 73.

His daughter Laura Tisch Broumand confirmed the death. The same day, his mother, Anne Steinberg, who had once sued Mr. Steinberg over an unpaid debt, died in her sleep in Palm Beach, Fla., the family said.

Mr. Steinberg came to symbolize whole eras in the fast-changing Wall Street culture. In the so-called go-go 1960s, he surfed the big waves of the buoyant stock market to capture a company, Reliance Insurance, more than 10 times the size of his own. He made that score in 1968; by the end of the year he had made more money on his own than any American under 30, Forbes magazine said. He code-named his takeover targets after famous actresses, like Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway.

In taking over Reliance, a 150-year-old company based in Philadelphia, Mr. Steinberg used the stock of his own computer leasing company, Leasco, in a creative financing scheme that involved the company’s shareholders’ taking on $400 million in debt.

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Saul P. Steinberg in 1968.Credit
Jack Drennan for The New York Times

The next year, 1969, he made a brash bid to use cash from Reliance to buy another establishment institution, Chemical Bank. The takeover attempt drew fire from Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and a number of United States senators, and it failed, but it vastly elevated Mr. Steinberg’s national profile.

“You watch: like the Rockefellers, I’ll own the world,” Vanity Fair magazine quoted him as telling the financial writer Dan Dorfman around that time. “I could even be the first Jewish president.”

But in the 1970s the junk-bond market and the general economy staggered, and so did Mr. Steinberg. He roared back in the ’80s, however, with smaller triumphs, most of them examples of what came to be called “greenmail,” the practice of buying about 5 percent of a company’s stock, then asking senior management for a seat on the board. His subsequent purchase of a few more shares was usually sufficient for management to pay him millions to drop the chase (or the pretense of one). In 1984, his hostile bid for the Walt Disney Company made him $60 million.

Mr. Steinberg used junk bonds and traditional financing to buy companies in a variety of industries, as well as various companies within an industry. At one point he owned both Days Inn and the Grand Hotel in Cap-Ferrat, in the South of France.

By the 1980s Mr. Steinberg, a portly man with a high-pitched voice, had become very rich, and was not afraid to show it. He and his wife, Gayfryd, lived in a 34-room, 17,000-square-foot Park Avenue apartment that had once belonged to John D. Rockefeller Jr. There they collected art treasures and antiques and gave fabulous parties. When his daughter Laura married Jonathan Tisch, of the hotel family, 500 guests mingled among 50,000 French roses. A year later, for Mr. Steinberg’s 50th birthday party, Mrs. Steinberg orchestrated 10 tableaus of living models displaying scenes from paintings by the old masters.

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Saul P. Steinberg with his wife, Gayfryd, in 1997. The two shared a lavish lifestyle, collecting art and antiques.Credit
Bill Cunningham/The New York Times

In the 1990s, Mr. Steinberg focused more on his insurance company, opening offices around the world and announcing new business lines. But in 1995, he was dealt a double blow: just as the insurance business was slipping, he had a serious stroke. In the turmoil, Mr. Steinberg fired his brother, Robert, who had been at his side in all his business endeavors, and borrowed $5 million from his mother, Anne Steinberg.

She later sued her son seeking repayment of the loan, but what happened to the suit amid his other financial troubles is not clear. Saddled with heavy debt from its past corporate takeovers, Reliance began suffering huge losses, and Pennsylvania regulators soon liquidated it in what was then the biggest insurance company failure in American history. And the Steinbergs sold their apartment and auctioned off 61 masterpiece paintings and antiques, including a bronze-plated commode that went for more than $2 million.

Saul Phillip Steinberg was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 13, 1939, and moved with his family to Long Island as a youth. His father, Julius, operated a factory that made bathmats. Saul entered the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania at 16 and graduated at 19. At the business school, he wrote a paper on I.B.M. and hit upon the notion that there was a market niche in leasing I.B.M. computers for four years at high prices.

Returning to Brooklyn, he began managing subway station newsstands. In 1961, when he was 22, his father lent him $25,000 to finance his leasing idea. At first called the Ideal Leasing Company, the firm had by 1967 become the Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corporation. Mr. Steinberg sold stock to the public to raise $750,000, and Leasco became the vehicle he used to buy Reliance. The insurance company, in turn, became a wellspring of cash for future corporate attacks.

For 15 years, Mr. Steinberg was chairman of Wharton’s board of overseers.

His first two marriages, to the former Barbara Herzog and the former Laura Sconocchia, ended in divorce. Besides his daughter Laura, from his first marriage, Mr. Steinberg is survived by his wife, the former Gayfryd McNabb; his brother, Robert; his sisters Roni Sokoloff and Lynda Jurist; two sons from his first marriage, Jonathan (who is married to the CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo) and Nicholas; a son from his second marriage, Julian; a son, Rayne, and a daughter, Holden, from his third marriage; and a number of grandchildren. Anne Steinberg’s death on Friday was reported in the New York Times death notices. No age or cause was given.

A sign on Mr. Steinberg’s Park Avenue office in English and Hebrew suggested the man’s immense energy. “On the eighth day,” it said, “Saul rested.”

Correction: December 12, 2012

An obituary on Tuesday about the financier Saul P. Steinberg misstated the name of the area in the South of France where he once owned a hotel. It is Cap-Ferrat, not Dap-Ferrat.

Correction: December 14, 2012

An obituary on Tuesday about the financier Saul P. Steinberg misidentified a previous owner of a Park Avenue apartment where Mr. Steinberg and his wife had lived. It once belonged to John D. Rockefeller Jr., not to John D. Rockefeller.

Julie Creswell contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2012, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Saul P. Steinberg, 73, Icon Of the Corporate Takeover. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe